I’m delighted to note that The Librarian’s Guide to
Micropublishing: Helping Patrons and Communities Use Free and Low-Cost
Publishing Tools to Tell Their Stories is now available, in
paperback from the publisher, Information Today, Inc. and all the usual
suspects (including Amazon—and it’s also available in ebook form) and in
casewrap hardcover from Lulu.

The paperback is $49.50 (usual disclaimer: I have absolutely
nothing to do with setting prices). The hardcover is $59.95, although Lulu
frequently has brief sales. I have both versions. They both look great and
essentially identical. I’ve sent autographed hardcover copies to the three
folks who read the unedited version and wrote blurbs (all on the back cover):
Robin Hastings, James LaRue and Maurice “baldgeek” Coleman. My thanks to them!

About the Hardcover

The hardcover version does two things:

ØIt makes a prebound
version available for libraries that want a hardcover copy for circulation. I
believe this book is going to be used by tens of thousands of patrons at
thousands of libraries. It’s a casewrap hardcover—the cover design is part of the
binding itself—so there’s no need to laminate paper jackets.

ØIt’s a proof of
concept. This book is about producing attractive, high-quality books without
spending any new money on software (assuming you have Word—or, although it’s
more difficult, OpenOffice or LibreOffice). Part of the process of preparing
the book was polishing a good general-purpose 6 × 9" book template for
Word, something that has no’t been freely available. The book itself uses the
template with no modifications. And, other than the title pages and the two ad
pages at the back of the book, the body of the book is a PDF generated directly
from Word2010, not using Adobe Acrobat. The same PDF is used for both paperback
and hardcover—but the hardcover is itself a prime and pure example of what the
book’s talking about, producing books in very small numbers without
compromising on appearance or quality. The book walks the talk; the hardcover
version is proof of that.

Who Needs This Book?

I’ve been saying that every public library (in the U.S. and in
other English-speaking countries where Lulu offers its services or CreateSpace
is available) needs this book. That’s probably a little grandiose, although the
possibility of adding a new community/creative service for your patrons without
any cost to the library (other than a copy of the book), especially a service
that speaks to long-form text and local creativity, strikes me as worthwhile
for even libraries serving fewer than 100 people. (As part of my next book
project, I’m now even more acutely aware of the sheer heterogeneity of
America’s 9,000-odd public libraries: I’ve attempted to view the web pages of
5,958 of them.)

I’ll offer some examples of libraries that should
specifically find this book more than worth the price. It’s potentially useful
for a number of academic and special libraries as well: More on that shortly.

ØLibraries serving
genealogists and family historians: You say there’s a link or tab on your
homepage specifically dealing with genealogy? You need this book. Where
there’s an amateur genealogist or a family historian, there’s a micropublished
book waiting to appear: A book that will probably only be produced in a few or
a few dozen copies but will be important to those families (and the local
history group). Now that maybe half the libraries in the country are taken care
of…

ØLibraries with
teen or adult writing classes or groups: You’d probably love to produce a
collection at the end of a successful class or as part of a group’s cycle. You
can do so without requiring any capital at all and it can look great. This book
shows you how. Quite a few of those writers probably want a durable example of
what they’ve done, their own book (possibly 24 pages of poems, possibly a
700-page epic) as a showpiece that might or might not morph into a major
publication. This book shows them how—and, by the way, we’ve provided a
special copyright exception so that, within reason, you can legally copy the
chapters of this book they’ll need as they’re preparing their own books, as
long as your library’s purchased one copy.

ØLibraries serving
local historians and historical societies: While family histories and
personal histories (including the oral histories most people my age and older
should be preparing) may be the most widespread examples of books that work
best through micropublishing, there are also lots of local historians (and
historical societies) out there who have manuscripts that deserve very
short-run book publication and don’t especially want to spend a few $thousand
to make that possible. With this book, all they need is Word (and not
necessarily even that). Your library can be the center of this creative
community-building process.

ØLibraries serving
writers who aren’t part of a writing group: One great thing about micropublishing
is that neither Lulu nor CreateSpace claims intellectual property rights.
They’re not publishers, they’re service agencies. (The exception: If you use
their free ISBNs–and for Lulu, you don’t need to–then they’re the publisher of
record for that edition. But the writer still owns the copyright and all rights
in everything except those 13 digits.) With this book, those writers can get
started with real books, handsome books, and if there’s enough interest,
there’s nothing stopping them from taking the books to traditional publishers.
(The library could create a great community service by finding ways for writers
to swap editorial services, since the best editing and copyediting really do
require eyes other than the writer’s.)

I’m sure there are other cases I haven’t thought of here,
but the ones listed here cover nearly every community, I suspect, including
most smallest communities. Is there somebody in Whale Pass, Alaska (not the
smallest library population at 31, but the smallest library that I know of with
a Facebook page) who could benefit from this book? I wouldn’t be surprised…

Does your library have a special collection, materials of
interest to some in the community and elsewhere that are too fragile for
circulation? If you own the rights to them, you can prepare circulatable books
with the content at very little cost. The techniques in this book will get you
started.

Library Schools

If your library school offers a course on libraries and
publishing, you need this book. (You also need Open Access: What You
Need to Know Now, but presumably you already have that. In multiple
copies.)

If your library school offers a course dealing with
innovative public services, you need this book.

Academic and Special Libraries

This book is primarily written for public libraries, but one
chapter focuses on academic libraries and micropublishing, primarily discussing
ejournals. If your academic library is getting into the open access ejournal
business, aren’t there a few authors and libraries who would happily pay to see
their work in book form? You can add an annual print edition (assuming the
journal publishes less than 750 pages per year) with zero financial outlay or
risk, although in this case you do need a copy of Acrobat. The book shows you
how. Oh, by the way, at least one academic library is already using Lulu to
build a virtual university press…and there will be more.

I know, I know, the patrons of special libraries and the
libraries themselves have unlimited funds, so this money-saving technique isn’t
relevant. (You can stop laughing; I hope you didn’t choke in the process.) But
maybe there are patrons of special libraries and even library projects where a
book would be a great outcome, but you know there’s only need for one, five, or
fifty copies, and you’re just about ready to go the ugly FedexKinko’s route.
This book can show you how to do it better and, quite probably, a little
cheaper as well.

A Word or Two about Professional Editing

That’s the story: The book’s out. I believe it’s the most
universally applicable book I’ve ever written, detailings a new service almost
every public library can usefully provide and the tools to make that service
work. Without any cost to the library–other than the price of the book. Such a
deal!

I think I’m a pretty good nonfiction writer: a hack in the
best sense of the term. For that matter, I think I’m a better than average
self-editor, although that may be delusional.

But I’ll suggest that all of my editors–and over the past
decades, I’ve dealt with quite a few–will tell you that I’m an easy writer to
deal with because I know my writing can always stand improvement. (In practice,
I don’t go back to my original ms. when looking at a galley unless I spot a
special problem: I read the galley on its own merits, assuming it represents an
improvement over the original.)

This book was unusual because I was making all of the
changes in the three full cycles and two or three minicycles of editing (line
editing, copyediting, “proofreading”). I was sending ITI a PDF; they were
returning the PDF with “stickies” (comments, which work a little like
Post-Its®) for editorial and proofreading suggestions. There were hundreds of
such proposed changes (many of them as small as correcting my bad habit of
overusing em dashes, one of them proposing a complete rewrite of a chapter). I
had to evaluate each change, since I was the only one who could make the
changes.

I believe I made 99% of
the proposed changes, maybe more. I know the book is the better for the
cycles of professional editing it received from John B. Bryans, Amy Reeve and
Brandi Scardilli (and possibly others whose names I’ve forgotten or didn’t
know). I know the book is better for M. Heide Dengler’s advice and
cooperation in refining the book template—professional advice that’s reflected
in the free .dotx, .dot and .odt templates available for book buyers to use and
modify. And, to be sure, the book benefits from professional indexing; in that
case, I’m not a hack so much as a talentless hack, so I really
appreciate the quality of the index. (They sent the index to me as a Word
document, so I just imported it into the manuscript before using the “Save and
Send” button to prepare the final PDF.) And, of course, I anticipate
considerable benefit from the professional marketing skills of Rob Colding.

There it is. It’s a book I’m proud of, a book I believe
thousands of libraries can benefit from, to the benefit of their patrons and
communities. Go buy it. I’m available to talk about micropublishing or hold
workshops…for a fee.

Cites & Insights 11 Out in Book Form

Cites
& Insights Volume 11, 2011, is now out in book form, available at
Lulu for the usual $50. The index is only available as part of the book. The
address: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/cites-insights-11-2011/18809137.

The Numbers for Cites & Insights

In 2011, there were 131,350 sessions at the Cites &
Insights homepage and 329,322 pageviews on the site from 22,314 IP
addresses. In all, there were some 77,000 PDF downloads and 225,000 HTML
pageviews (but that includes site overhead).

Overall, there continue to be two C&I issues with
more than 10,000 PDF downloads (one with more than 32,000). Three more are over
9,000 (all reaching that level last year), four more over 8,000 (one breaking
that mark last year), ten over 7,000 (including seven that reached 7,000 during
2011), and so on… 62 issues have had at least 5,000 downloads and only ten fewer
than 1,000—but that ten includes five of last year’s nine issues. Looking only
at 2011 downloads, it’s curious that “Library 2.0 and ‘Library 2.0’” still
leads the pack, since for more than half the year the PDF has been a stub (and
the substitute location has only been downloaded 22 times, while the book has
sold seven copies to date). Next is 11:2, the followup on the topic—which has
also been a stub for most of the year.

Looking at article readership, the top articles overall
haven’t changed much. Six articles appear to have been viewed (in PDF or HTML
form) at least 15,000 times:

Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0”

Perspective: Investigating the Biblioblogosphere

Perspective: Looking at Liblogs: The Great Middle

Perspective: Conference Speaking: I Have a Little List

Perspective: Life Trumps Blogging

Perspective: Book Searching: OCA/GBS Update. Those are all
from 2005-2007.

Looking only at HTML article pageviews during 2011, I find 10
articles viewed more than 1,000 times and another 10 viewed between 800 and 999
times—again, not including the full-issue downloads. With those included, these
would range from 24,194 down to 1,578. Here are the articles, listed from most
viewed during 2011 (2,458) to least within the top 20 (851):

Making it Work Perspective: Five Years Later: Library 2.0
and Balance (cont.)

Open Access Perspective Part I: Pioneer Journals: The Arc of
Enthusiasm, Five Years Later

Perspective: Writing about Reading

The Zeitgeist: hypePad and buzzkill

Old Media/New Media

Ethical Perspectives: Republishing and Blogging

Copyright Comments: Public Domain

The Zeitgeist: Blogging Groups and Ethics

Perspective: The Google Books Search Settlement

Perspective: On the Literature.

The article that I had the most personal issues with during the
year, given its apparent total lack of impact within the field? It missed the
800 mark by 18 pageviews.

What about the Blog?

I looked at 2011 statistics for Walt at Random as well,
and while they’re certainly impressive, I think they’re mostly related to
spiders and spammers.

The impressive part: 487,649 sessions and 2,251,367
pageviews—yes, that’s two and a quarter million pageviews—from 49,655 IP
addresses.

The less impressive part: When I look at most viewed pages,
the first hundred are almost entirely month and category indexes, not actual
posts. And the highest posts aren’t ones that make a lot of sense. My
conclusion is that most of the traffic isn’t actually people reading what few
posts I do.

For what it’s worth, here are the ten actual posts with the
most apparent pageviews, where they appear ordinally among the 6,044 pages and
how often they were viewed (or “viewed”) during 2011:

If you can come up with a common thread among those ten posts
(other than “Walt Crawford wrote them all”), you’re a better synthesis than I
am.

Prospectus: An Ongoing Public Library Social Network Scan

I believe it would be
worthwhile to do an annual nationwide survey of public library presence on
social networks, looking at all U.S. public libraries–9,184 of them (based on
IMLS figures as reported in Hennen’s American Public Library Ratings (HAPLR)).

The Baseline

As background for my 2012 ALA
Editions book Successful Social Networking in Public Libraries, I looked
at all public libraries in 25 states (distributed by population) in late summer
2011—and later added the libraries in 13 more states, for a total of 5,958
libraries in 38 states. For the first 25 states (and 2,406 libraries), I
revisited four months after the first visit to look at changes in social
networking.

The result is two
spreadsheets, one of which (LSNALL) would be the baseline for the new project.
(The other, LSN25, looks at the four-month changes. It wouldn’t be relevant for
the new project.)

LSNALL includes, for each library, the following, based on
my own searching and results:

ØLibrary name and
Legal Service Area population as provided by the state library in its
spreadsheet, noting that “Library name” is frequently something other than the
name the library actually uses. (Only libraries that have an LSA are included,
leaving out 7,000-odd branches but also cooperative agencies that aren’t
double-counted.)

ØState abbreviation

ØDate on which I
checked the library

Ø“FB?”–a code indicating
whether I found a working Facebook link to a library Facebook page on the
website (w), in the first 100 Google results (g), or by searching Facebook
itself (f), in that order–or, if none was found, whether I found a community or
information Facebook page instead (i) or nothing at all (n).

ØIf there is a
Facebook page (or group, or non-page account), the number of Likes (or friends).

ØFor the most recent
and fifth most recent Facebook post from the library itself, a code indicating
its currency bucket: d (the day I checked), e (week–within the past seven days
including today), f (fortnight), m (month), q (quarter), s (six months), y
(year) or z (more than a year). (“e” was chosen to make the buckets directly
sortable.)

ØA one-letter code
indicating whether I found some signs of interactivity within the “visible”
posts (usually 20 to 30): “y” for a non-library comment or a non-spam post from
someone other than the library; “l” if I found likes (by someone other than the
library!) on posts but no comments; “s” if I found only spam comments (or only
spam and likes); and blank if I found none of those.

ØA Twitter code,
similar to Facebook except that there are no “i” cases and I use “t” instead of
“f” if the Twitter account could only be found within Twitter itself.

ØFollowers,
following, and tweets.

ØThe same most recent
and fifth most recent bucket codes for tweets

ØAn interactivity
code, usually based on either non-library tweets, retweets, or tweets beginning
“@”–I didn’t look as far for these, and don’t regard the results as very
meaningful.

ØComments if
needed—sparsely. (E.g., “FB0″
for a few cases where a library Facebook page is apparently the library’s
actual page but has no updates, up through FB4 if there aren’t yet five
updates, or “FB teen” or the like where there’s no general-purpose FB page but
appear to be specialized pages.)

ØAdded after the
initial scan: “SN?”–a number from 0 to 2 indicating how many of the two
possibilities the library had–and “H”–a number from 0 to 9 providing the HAPLR
size category (0 being under 1,000, 9 being 500,000 and up), to ease sorting
and, as it turns out, reporting.

A derivative spreadsheet, LSN38, leaves out rows with SN?=0
(libraries with no findable social network presence) and adds derivative
columns for use in the book, such as “F%” (Likes divided by LSA), “T%” (same
for Twitter followers), “T/F” (followers divided by likes), “Fr” (followings
divided by followers) and “Fmx” and “Tmx”—two-character codes indicating
frequency and reach buckets. There are also metrics spreadsheets and pages
within these spreadsheets, of course, but the primary LSNALL spreadsheet is the
true baseline.

Proposed One-Year Revision

With proper funding in place and possibly better ways to
distribute the results, I’d do this between June and November 2012:

ØStart a new
spreadsheet (linked to the old one for comparative metrics) to include the
other 12 states and DC (which would require either acquiring Access or working
with a partner, since the other 12 states don’t seem to have downloadable
spreadsheets) and update it for current LSA figures.

ØCheck each row in
the spreadsheet to fill in columns as follows:

1.Actual library name—initially copied from names supplied by the state
library, replaced if searching yields a different name or form of name. If so,
that name would be used in a new Google search (Google unless Bing is modified
to allow a 100-results-per-page setting, in which case I’d use Bing, since it
seems to yield better results for public library websites).

2.Position of the library’s official website (if one is found) in the
result.

3.Facebook columns as at present, with these changes: a. The second
“current post” bucket would be based on the 10th most recent post, but
normalized to the same meanings (i.e., two days, two weeks, two fortnights,
etc.) b. The interactivity column would be replaced with a number representing
the number of non-library, non-spam comments and posts found within the first
ten library posts, from 0 to whatever. Post-level likes would be ignored.

4.Twitter columns as at present, with the same “bucket” change as for
Facebook and with the “Following” actual number replaced with a code indicating
general approach of following (open to modification, but storing the actual
number feels like overkill). Unsure whether to modify the interactivity column
or simply drop it.

5.Google+ columns along the same lines as Facebook columns, but with the
number for “Added to circles” replacing Likes. (Subject to change.)

6.Optional, if someone believes it’s worth doing and
would pay extra for it: Blogging column, with a number for the number of blogs
identified on the library’s homepage, and with a separate spreadsheet
identifying those blogs. (This could lead to a five-year update of my Public
Library Blogs study. It may be a lot more work than it’s worth. The Public
Library Blogs book sold 31 copies, but that was with only my own
publicity.)

7.Optional, and I’m not sure any of these are worthwhile: Columns for
MySpace presence, YouTube presence, Flickr presence indicated on homepage.

Later Years

Similar spreadsheet, linked to earlier sheets or pages for
analysis, and adding significant new social networks that welcome institutional
pages/accounts if such networks appear.

Deliverables

The deliverables would depend heavily on who’s paying for this
and what they want. Possibilities:

ØWriteup of results
including comparisons to 2011 and metrics similar to those planned for the
forthcoming book, distributed as a free PDF. The writeup (and specific
writeups) would include not only benchmarks by size of library and state, but
also case studies and lists of libraries doing particularly well in various
metrics relative to their size, to serve as examples for other libraries
wanting to improve their social networking.

ØMore specific
writeups for individual states or for specific library sizes.

ØPossibly the
spreadsheet itself for further analysis.

How to Pay

I believe the results would be valuable, since I believe most
public libraries can benefit from a social networking presence and it’s clear
that most of them are not reaching as many people as they’d probably like to. A
variety of benchmarks and examples should help. (My book should help too,
combining benchmarks, examples, discussion, advice…)

But it’s way too much work to do for free or on spec. My
experiments in self-publishing have taught me that, and have taught me that I
can’t do it based on the hope of selling the results on my own, since I’m a
good researcher but a terrible publicist.

I figure I could do this for $15,000 a year for the whole process,
including deliverables (but not including #6 and #7 above). Adding #6 would
push that to $20,000; adding #7 is unclear.

That is small potatoes for most funding agencies, but it
would meet my needs.

Possible avenues:

ØAn agency could
sponsor this—such as a foundation or an agency that already does library
research, or, for that matter, an agency that finds it worthwhile. I’d be
delighted to work with almost any such agency. The one real exception is one
where I can’t imagine they’d want to work with me. I’d be delighted to work
with OCLC or WebJunction on this, or the Gates Foundation, a library school, a
vendor, almost any consortium, whoever. I suspect my lack of institutional
affiliation is a problem for most funding sources, but I’d love to be proved
wrong. Unfortunately, independent research is not highly regarded in this
field, as with most other fields.

ØA group of state
libraries could sponsor it, in which case I’d narrow the research to cover only
those states and charge a different fee, something along the lines of $500 + $n
per state, where $n is the number of reporting libraries in the state times a
constant, probably $1 to $2.

ØI could find some way
to be assured that sales of the report–which I’d prefer to be free–would come
close to generating $15,000 in revenue. I don’t see too many pigs flying
overhead, so I don’t regard that one as probable.

ØI could prepare a
Kickstarter project, video and all. Would it be accepted by the curators? No
idea. Would it stand a chance? Stranger things have happened…

I need help on this. I’d need to have funding lined up by June
in order to plot out the survey process, and by May if I was going to attend
this year’s ALA Annual Conference. If I can’t work something out by June, I’ll
probably turn my attention to other book or writing possibilities and abandon
this.

If you think you could help find a home for this, let me
know: waltcrawford@gmail.com.

A library is…: A possible offshoot

Here’s a possible offshoot of this project, at least for 2012.
Lots of public libraries have mottoes or sayings on their websites (and
probably elsewhere). Not all, by any means; I’d guesstimate 1/3, but that’s a
NSWAG (non-scientific wild-ass guess).

Those mottoes are frequently interesting as tiny indications
of what libraries are, or regard themselves as.

It might be fun and, I don’t know, uplifting to have a
collection of these mottoes. I’m calling it “A library is…” for the moment,
although I suspect only a minority of the sayings could be used to complete
that statement.

If there’s interest, and if I get funding, preparing that
collection could be an offshoot. It certainly wouldn’t be worth looking at all
9,000+ libraries (or the 8,000+, at a guess, that have websites) to find them,
but if I was there anyway, capturing and organizing them would be a minor extra
task.

Does this seem intriguing to anybody else? If I try the
Kickstarter route, A library is… would almost certainly be one of the
thank-you items, especially since it could be offered at four or five different
levels (PDF or EPUB or HTML; softcover book; autographed softcover book;
hardcover book; autographed hardcover book).

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 12, Number 1, Whole # 145, ISSN 1534-0937, a
journal of libraries, policy, technology and media, is written and produced
irregularly by Walt Crawford.

All original material in this work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. To view a copy of this
license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0 or send a letter
to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.